During this pathbreaking booklet, Matthias B. Lehmann explores Ottoman Sephardic tradition in an period of switch via a detailed learn of popularized rabbinic texts written in Ladino, the vernacular language of the Ottoman Jews. This vernacular literature, status on the crossroads of rabbinic elite and well known cultures and of Hebrew and Ladino discourses, sheds invaluable mild at the modernization of Sephardic Jewry within the japanese Mediterranean within the nineteenth century.

In tune within the Holocaust Shirli Gilbert offers the 1st large-scale, severe account in English of the function of track among groups imprisoned lower than Nazism. She files a large scope of musical actions, starting from orchestras and chamber teams to choirs, theatres, communal sing-songs, and cabarets, in probably the most very important internment centres in Nazi-occupied Europe, together with Auschwitz and the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos.

Introduces the Jewish competition of lighting fixtures, or Hanukkah, touching on the tale at the back of the vacation and the way it's celebrated.

Additional info for Journeys Beyond The Pale: Yiddish Travel Writing In The Modern World

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Mendele, moreover, Judaized the space beyond the shtetl by consistently using a system heavily embedded with Jewish iconography to describe it. Mendele was most comfortable in the broader world and in natural settings. Yet the broader world, as it was described in the tales, was a Judaized rendering, with Christians few and far between. ”54 As a literary tool, the mobility of Sholem Aleichem, like that of Mendele, was a means for situating the tale within a “real” voice of the people, traversing literary borders, and making the story part of a dialogue.

Ask the goy, Senderl, if he happens to have heard of Mount Nisbon and the heretic el-Torak? Ask him if he knows anything about the Ten Lost Tribes. . Go ahead, maybe he does. . ” Senderl might say, asking if their captain knew of any lost Jews. ” Senderl would expostulate. ” (“Explain to him what a mountain is, Senderl,” Benjamin would urge. )44 The Christian cannot understand Benjamin and Senderl’s garbled Ukrainian. Moreover, he does not live in the same bipolar mythic landscape of the Jewish characters.

Within the book other characters enact his chivalric imaginings by playing the parts of knights, damsels in distress, and the like. While the other characters inhabit the “surface La Mancha,” they at times pretend to be characters of Don Quixote’s imagined La Mancha. 39 Only Don Quixote lacks the ability to enter and exit the mad realm at will and instead is the sole inhabitant of the mirage La Mancha. 40 Moreover, the bipolar reality of Don Quixote is singular, with no stark division between Benjamin’s madness and the rest of the world’s sanity.